Carlos Saura
Carlos Saura Atarés (4 January 1932 – 10 February 2023) was a Spanish film director, photographer and writer. With Luis Buñuel and Pedro Almodóvar, he is considered to be among Spain's great filmmakers. He had a long and prolific career that spanned over half a century, and his films won many international awards.
In this Spanish name, the first or paternal surname is Saura and the second or maternal family name is Atarés.
Carlos Saura
10 February 2023 (aged 91)
Film director, screenwriter, photographer
1955–2023
- Adela Medrano
- Mercedes Pérez
-
Eulàlia Ramon(m. 2006)
Geraldine Chaplin (1967–1979)
7
Antonio Saura (brother)
Saura began his career in 1955 making documentary shorts. He gained international prominence when his first feature-length film premiered at Cannes Film Festival in 1960. Although he started filming as a neorealist, Saura switched to films encoded with metaphors and symbolism in order to get around the Spanish censors. In 1966, he was thrust into the international spotlight when his film The Hunt won the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival.[1] In the following years, he forged an international reputation for his cinematic treatment of emotional and spiritual responses to repressive political conditions.
By the 1970s, Saura was the best known filmmaker working in Spain. His films employed complex narrative devices and were frequently controversial. He won Special Jury Awards for Cousin Angelica (1973) and Cría Cuervos (1975) in Cannes, and he received an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film nomination in 1979 for Mama Turns 100.
In the 1980s, Saura was in the spotlight for his Flamenco trilogy – Blood Wedding, Carmen and El amor brujo, in which he combined dramatic content and flamenco dance forms. His work continued to be featured in worldwide competitions and earned numerous awards. He received two nominations for Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film for Carmen (1983) and Tango (1998). His films are sophisticated expression of time and space fusing reality with fantasy, past with present, and memory with hallucination. In the last two decades of the 20th century, Saura concentrated on works uniting music, dance and images.
Personal life and death[edit]
Carlos Saura was married three times. He first married Adela Medrano.[11] They had two sons, Carlos and Antonio.[11] In 1982, he married Mercedes Pérez, with whom he had three sons, Manuel, Adrián, and Diego.[11] Between those two marriages, Saura had a son Shane with actress Geraldine Chaplin.[12] He was the father of a daughter named Anna from his third marriage to actress Eulàlia Ramon,[11][13] whom he began a relationship in the wake of the shooting of Outrage.[14] They married in 2006.[14] His daughter Anna was his agent (as well as right hand and producer of his films) in his late years.[15][16]
He was an avid photographer and had a collection of over 600 cameras.[1] His photographs were exhibited several times.[1] He began to take photographs having reached the age of eight years, and later built his own camera by himself and became the photographer of the Granada Film Festival.[17]
Saura was a close friend of fellow Aragonese filmmaker Luis Buñuel. They met at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival.[18]
Saura lived in Collado Mediano since the early 1980s.[19]
Saura died of respiratory failure in his residence of Collado Mediano on 10 February 2023 at the age of 91.[20][21][22] He was due to receive the life-achievement Goya honorary award the following day during the 37th Goya Awards.[23]